“Alas! a sad misfortune for me, monsieur le comte,” said Malicorne, changing color.
“Yet not without remedy, I hope,” returned De Guiche.
“The remedy is found easily enough,” exclaimed De Wardes; “you can be created a gentleman. His Eminence, the Cardinal Mazarin, did nothing else from morning till night.”
“Hush, hush, De Wardes,” said the count; “no jests of that kind; it ill becomes us to turn such matters into ridicule. Letters of nobility, it is true, are purchasable; but that is a sufficient misfortune without the nobles themselves laughing at it.”
“Upon my word, De Guiche, you’re quite a Puritan, as the English say.”
At this moment the Vicomte de Bragelonne was announced by one of the servants in the courtyard, in precisely the same manner as he would have done in a room.
“Come here, my dear Raoul. What! you, too, booted and spurred? You are setting off, then?”
Bragelonne approached the group of young men, and saluted them with that quiet and serious manner peculiar to him. His salutation was principally addressed to De Wardes, with whom he was unacquainted, and whose features, on his perceiving Raoul, had assumed a strange sternness of expression. “I have come, De Guiche,” he said, “to ask your companionship. We set off for Havre, I presume.”
“This is admirable—delightful. We shall have a most enjoyable journey. M. Malicorne, M. Bragelonne—ah! M. de Wardes, let me present you.” The young men saluted each other in a restrained manner. Their very natures seemed, from the beginning, disposed to take exception to each other. De Wardes was pliant, subtle, full of dissimulation; Raoul was calm, grave, and upright. “Decide between us—between De Wardes and myself, Raoul.”
“Upon what subject?”